In an letter to George Ticknor, Jefferson equated knowledge with power, safety, and happiness: [T]his last establishment [a state university] will probably be within a mile of Charlottesville, and four from Monticello, if the system should be adopted at all by our legislature who meet within a week from this time. John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations , 10th ed.
Boston: Little, Brown and Co. The entry for this quotation is available online at Bartleby. Transcription available at Founders Online. Participate Login or register to participate in our online community. Search form Search. Knowledge alone is clearly not power, as far too often there are barriers to acting. You can have perfect knowledge but:. In our organizational lives and more broadly in the world at large , we all have a great deal of knowledge and the potential to make an impact, but few of us have the power to act effectively.
Too often, people have little agency and insufficient political nouse to make an impact regardless of their knowledge. And then, sometimes, people act on the knowledge they have, not for the benefit of the whole but for selfish purposes, and fail to share it more widely.
It would be more accurate to say that the will and the ability to act on the knowledge we possess is power. But the power we are talking about here is social and political — the ability to influence people or events. This power comes from one of two sources, authoritative power, in other words, the power bestowed on us or our intrinsic influential power regardless of our authority. Unless we have massive authoritative power, we need to influence and work well with other people if we are to achieve anything.
Sharing knowledge is one of the cornerstones of Knowledge Management KM , but KM is more than sharing our knowledge and not hoarding it. We need to share our knowledge and motivate, influence, and work with others to get things done. This is the fourth level of Knowledge Management. How do we achieve this? Primarily we do it through the conversations that we have with each other. You happen to visit the mayor of Rotterdam and, during that time, you describe in vivid detail what is going to happen to his town over the next 25 years.
The mayor listens to this information placidly. He gives every sign of believing you. When I ask this question in discussion groups, we always reach the same answer: there is nothing the mayor can be expected to do. Even if he gives your prediction a higher degree of credibility than most of the other information which reached him, he would have neither the courage nor the powers of persuasion to take the far-reaching decision that is required by such a prediction.
The future cannot be predicted. But, even if it could, we would not dare to act on the prediction. Suppose a time traveler returned to the present day from and told us in graphic detail what was to become of the world due to global warming. We already have a pretty good idea of the consequences, but now we know for sure. Do you think it would make any difference whatsoever to our response?
Even with perfect knowledge, even if we could accurately predict the future, more often than not, we do not have the ability to act on that knowledge.
Knowledge alone is not power. Self-motivation, taking responsibility, acting on knowledge, and influencing and working with people, especially those in authority, is power. You must be logged in to post a comment. The four levels of Knowledge Management. Credit: Michael Schrage.
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